Mira Neshama Niculescu

Jewish Meditation

JEWISH MEDITATION-History

Yet for millennia, because it was traditionally reserved to an elite of learned pious men, Jewish Meditation remained mostly unknown to the wider Jewish audience.

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In the second part of the 20th century, especially after the Shoah, things started to change: Jews, like Westerners in general, were more and more drawn to Meditation practices. Because nothing much seemed available in the Jewish world, they started "going East", towards Eastern practices to quench their thirst for spirituality.

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This triggered a strategic change from Jewish teachers and rabbis: witnessing the yearning of Jews for meditation and spiritual practices, they decided to make Jewish Meditation available to all Jews.

This is how since the eighties, rabbis such as Aryeh Kaplan, Dov Baer Pinson, David Aharon Rubin or Marc Alain Ouaknine, have started retrieving traditional Jewish meditation sources, and making and making them available to a wider audience.